Best posts made by faraday

@Ghost said in Good or New Movies Review:

Nope, at least not "kid like" kids. It's just a shame to see Disney pushing the button hardcore on all of these characters that aren't their flagship characters. A good Pixar-type Mickey and the Gang movie might be fun.

As @Derp mentioned, they push those characters a lot for the preschool-age crowd. There are multiple TV shows, TV movies, toys, music -- oh dear lord the Christmas music; I'm going on ten years now of listening to Goofy singing White Christmas every year... trust me, Mickey and the Gang are alive and well I am surprised they haven't tried a full theatrical release though.

@Groth said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

So how do you now distinguish between the default mail which people expect to be there from your super special mail you wrote for this game in particular?

You don't need to. Really, you don't. If you want to provide good UX for your players, then you will make the basic mail commands on your super-special custom mail program work the same as the built-in mail. Then it doesn't matter what additional features you provide.

As long as 'who' tells them who's online, they really don't care what it looks like. There's no reason to separate WHO or +who (other than the aforementioned historical reasons).

@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

Hmm.. has me wondering how hard it'd be to convert DFRPG style wizardry to FS3

No clue, but I can say with confidence that it'd be easier to implement DFRPG on Evennia or Ares than on MU softcode.

@Ghost said in Recent banning:

No longer has keys to the house even if it comes back to mind

Password reset works pretty well for that too.

@Ganymede said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

To be clear, I’m not suggesting to not go to the doctor. Yes, go to the doctor. Please go.

Similarly I am not trying to sound alarm bells "OMG get to the doctor immediately it could be something horrible" like the kid from Kindergarten Cop.

I’m taking into consideration that this may not be financially feasible, though, and am attempting to comfort someone who seems troubled and distressed by being in a tough spot.

A noble and worthy goal. Speculating that it might only be a cracked rib or pulled muscle is perfectly fine. That's information Auspice can weigh into their decision making, google and compare symptoms, etc.

Jumping from there to "eh there's probably nothing a doctor could do anyway" (paraphrased) is the sort of thing that might sway a waffling person into not seeking treatment. And it's just not accurate. Bacterial pleurisy might be aided by a round of antibiotics. There are other things it could be that might also be treatable.

Armchair medical advice over the internet is just as bad as armchair legal advice.

@Derp said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

If it were one game, yes, I could see this argument being sensible, but this is a type of game that you are learning, and so this argument is nonsense.

In my experience, that is quite simply untrue. Just look at how many players have successfully transitioned over to Arx (using Evennia) or BSGU (using Ares). I've had a bunch of players on Ares who don't even realize they're playing a different game server. They think it's just some kind of customized PennMUSH. It is absolutely possible to preserve 90% of the experience a player is used to while still expanding and simplifying that experience. It's called backwards compatibility and it's really not rocket science.

As for why more people aren't using them, there are a variety of reasons for that, not the least of which is that both are still in development.

@WildBaboons said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

I am leaning towards a (maybe heavily) modified FS3 at the moment. Folks are pretty familiar with it and with AresMUSH most of the heavy lifting is done.

If you need to "heavily" modify it, I think you'll save yourself a lot of headaches if you just start from scratch. Enough people are familiar with it that if you start throwing in all kinds of extreme modifications, you're just going to be swimming upstream against expectations and confusing everyone. There's nothing particularly magical about the FS3 skills code. It's just a roll&count success system, same as SR4 and nWOD. You could steal the basic building blocks of the code and adapt it easily enough to whatever skill system actually fit your game.

@ganymede said in Forum wonk:

That would cost less than a full data 'port.

In the short-term, yes. In the long-term, no.

You're looking at an extra $200-ish per year, conservatively. And as the database continues to grow, the memory needs will grow (because Redis is an in-memory database). So really you're just kicking the can down the curb and not really solving the problem.

I'm fine starting fresh. I do reference old topics sometimes but it's something I can certainly live without.

I'm also fine chipping in for a gofundme to help pay for the one-time migration cost to a sane database. It may not be actually nodebb that's the problem, but the way this particular one is set up.

@Sunny said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

All else is false. And wrong. And false and wrong. And also should be lit on fire. That's my professional opinion. (I state again, in case anyone missed it, this is very specifically in reference to formal/business writing.)

That's cool. But other professional editors can and do have their own professional opinions about the ideal style for their publications. I've been under both CMS and AP styles at various organizations throughout my tech writing career.

Every writing organization is entitled to their own style. That's why the guides are called Elements of Style and the Chicago Manual of Style and AP Style and not The AP Guide to the One True Way of Writing English. For better or worse, we don't have a French Academy dictating how the language should be done "correctly."

@ThatGuyThere said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

Unless you want to make it so the who list can be sortable by the person checking it i fail to see how having the same information presented in two different ways is a bad thing.

Those are valid reasons for expanding the functionality of the 'who' command, not for having two obscurely different versions of it. But that's just IMHO. If you're happy with the status quo, then there's no reason to change anything. Some of us aren't, though.

@Tempest Yeah, that's been my biggest disappointment with the system. It's like people are all: "Well, I know this system isn't really a good fit for my game and I don't like it all that much, but I'll inflict it on my players anyway because I have no other options."

@arkandel said in Forum wonk:

redis is the very likely but not 100% root cause.

The current redis configuration is almost certainly a problem, even if it's not the only problem. I think fixing it is a pre-requisite for doing anything else if you're going to stay on nodebb.

From what I saw on the discourse forums, it's easily $500 worth of work to try to migrate the existing database to discourse, if you could even manage it. (There were lots of reports of issues when I looked into it months ago because the forum data paradigms just don't line up completely. Also it's not formally supported.) Maybe you could get someone to do it pro bono, but the order of magnitude of effort is comparable.

After forgetting four separate times to bring up a new pack of toilet paper from the basement, I put the empty toilet paper pack wrapper in the hallway so I would literally trip over it to remind me. Then one of my kids was like: "Why is this in the hallway?" and moved it. :facepalm:

@Bobotron Yeah, @Thenomain informed me that the integration with mediawiki is done with a direct SQL connection. Wikidot doesn't allow SQL access, so I guess that's just a mediawiki thing.

Having dealt with the mediawiki database before, all I can say is... good luck. Ares talks to wikidot because it actually offers a coherent API (albeit a limited one that requires a pro plan). You can connect Ruby to a MySQL database pretty easily but I'm just not going to code it. Backdooring into the database is too fragile and hackish to be in the stock install.

ETA: Apparently there's a M-W Ruby API now too. Dunno how stable it is. Might be one for Python too for Evennia.

@Lithium said in FS3:

My biggest beef with FS3 has been what people have forced it to do. It felt really clunky on the few games I tried to play that had it.

Isn't that kinda like saying your biggest beef with a hammer is when someone uses it to smash a glass window?

I tease. But really, I get it. @Thenomain is always ribbing me for trying to talk people out of using FS3 around here, but seriously... folks trying to square-peg-round-hole games into it causes no end of frustration for all concerned.

@Glitch Well, the entry requirement is being willing to be subjected to unfiltered aggressive dialogue, which this discussion wasn't. Also, saying "you can open the door and go through" does not detract from the feeling of having the door slammed in your face in the first place.

Edit to add: I'm not saying 'never move threads' I'm just suggesting that maybe use a little higher bar of whether something really truly is worthy before moving something behind a firewall. I mean, considering the tone of the criticisms leveled at people in other threads, it didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary here.

@Macha said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):

et's just say I never, ever, thought some of the things I do/feel/etc, could be autism related. I thought everyone felt/did/etc those things

It's been very interesting for me, learning about neurodiversity, to be like: "Oh, so that's why other people seem to do/feel/see things so differently."

I will point out, though, that there's a fair chunk of overlap between autism and ADHD symptoms. Some researchers are beginning to suspect that they may be on the same spectrum, or very closely related.

This chart is kind of reductive in asserting that all people with ADHD or ASD have the checkmarks, or none of them have the blanks, which is decidedly not true. But it's still useful for highlighting the commonalities.

@zombiegenesis I don't know too much about Transformers, (having seen only a couple of the movies and the Rescue Bots kids show) but I can speak generally about combat in FS3.

The weapon/armor behavior is complicated (described in detail here), and is probably the hardest part of the system to balance.

Skew it too much one way, and bullets bounce off bulletproof vests like Superman. Skew it too much the other way, and bullets tear through them like paper. With a wide variety of weapon types all having different penetrative capabilities (pistols, shotguns, knives, rifles, etc.) it is incredibly tedious to tune everything to generate a "fun" balance.

The built-in BSG configuration does have two "classes" of weapons and armor built in - personal and vehicle. This works because:

• The weapons and armors of each class are balanced against each other.
• Cross-class combat (i.e., a rifleman versus a space fighter) is pretty uncommon thematically in BSG, so the quirks of the system can be hand-managed by the GMs.

I think you could make the transformer robots work similar to the vehicles in the BSG setting, but having it also tuned for titans would probably be a bridge too far.

@SG No, that won't help. What I presume you ultimately want is for a jedi with a lightsaber to defend with "lightsaber skill" but everyone else to still defend with the base defense (or "3" by default). And even that wouldn't let you deflect a blaster bolt back at them (which is what I meant by "riposte") or use any other force abilities.

You can hack all that into the system in whatever way you choose. It just doesn't support any of it out of the box via configuration.